Is taking responsibility the secret ingredient of agile?

Author: Rasmus Ståhle, Project Manager @ Codemate

Scandinavian Agile (Scan Agile) is a conference organised by Agile Finland ry and its held yearly in Helsinki. This year was the third time I participated in Scan Agile. Some of the topics covered this year were complexity, leadership, teamwork, product development, coaching and much more. I personally know some of the organisers and must give them kudos for organising such a great event.

During the last few years, I’ve done a lot of thought work to understand what is it that really makes us agile. What is the secret sauce? Is there a recipe that we can follow to become truly agile?

Is there a secret ingredient?

Have I found the secret ingredient? Maybe not, but what I have noticed is that when we think of agility, we are easily focusing a lot more on frameworks or processes than people.

Susanne Husebø gave a talk at Scan Agile about ”Symptoms of well functioning teams” and what I noticed was interesting: almost all of the characteristics of a well-functioning team is related to how we communicate and work together rather than how we follow some processes. Susanne, as she describes, had a totally non-scientific approach to the topic, and I liked it. Sometimes science is beneficial but sometimes it’s a good idea to just do things together, experiment and learn – fast.

One symptom of a well-functioning team that Susanne presented was that ”good teams share responsibility”. I feel this is a very important ingredient of successful agile teams. Why? Because of The Responsibility Process.

Taking responsibility

In the keynote ”The Responsibility Process: Unlocking Your Natural Ability to Live and Lead with Power” Christopher Avery presented The Responsibility Process. His point was that when we talk about responsibility, we have to understand that there is a vast difference between being responsible and taking responsibility. Being responsible is something laid upon us, it is about being good and doing what you should or what is expected from you. Taking responsibility is about freedom of choice and commitment to self-leadership.

The symptom “good teams share responsibility” can now be seen in a very different light, when we understand the difference between acting responsible and taking responsibility.

What is a high-performing team? One view would be that the outcome of the collaboration is higher than just the sum of individual effort. Achieving high-performance requires that we take responsibility as individuals and as a team instead of just acting responsibly.

Modern leadership

How does the organisational structure affect personal responsibility and team performance? Traditional command and control type of hierarchical structures created by Frederich Taylor is where thinkers are placed higher and doers lower in the organisational structure. Workers are given tasks and are expected to only act responsibly. Modern software development organisations have moved away from this kind of thinking already quite some time ago, but there are still lots of things we could improve.

Waterfall development process was introduced in the 1970s and it has been commonly used in software development projects. In waterfall, project managers are planning, controlling and reporting to ensure that the project will meet its goals and succeed within budget.

Today software development projects are more complex and therefore we need to focus on how we organise ourselves around knowledge-based creative work. We should move away from traditional management to modern leadership. Modern leadership creates an environment of trust and is supporting teams and individuals to take responsibility, together. When a group of people has freedom of choice, is committed to a common goal and operates in an environment of trust, you just give them the problem and they will give you a solution.

Moving from waterfall to agile practices, changes how we do work and this also creates new challenges to project management. Project Managers should focus more on coaching and ensuring that teams are enabled to deliver high quality results for end customers.

Trust will get things done

It’s been known for a longer time that organisations should move away from command and control type of structures. Many organisations have done structural changes but we also need to look deeper into how our management and leadership should change to support this new direction.

Organisations should create an environment based on trust, support individuals and teams to take responsibility instead of just acting responsibly. Software development is complex work and we need cross-functional and self-organizing teams to collaborate together and create value for both end users and customers.

I challenge you to take a moment and ask yourself, What is “the secret ingredient” in your agile recipe?